Facilitators & Active Listeners

FACILITATORS

Dani Kwan-Lafond

Dani is a mixed race scholar interested in education, anti-racism and feminist political economy. She is currently completing her phd at York university. Most recently, she co-authored an article about mixed race people and interracial dating. Dani is the co-founder of two registered charities, including the Toronto arts organization Drum Artz Canada. She is also a social worker, percussionist, and a parent.

Jaene F. Castrillon

Jaene is an artist utilizing art and intersecting it with activism. Her main disciplines are performance art, dance and film-making. Jaene is an artist who explores her relationship to the world through various spiritual teachings and the wisdom of the land. As a person who fits into many boxes (Queer, Disabled, Bi-racial, Indigenous Colombian, Chinese, Canadian, Mentally Ill & survived child abuse, being in care, self-harm, psychiatric hospitalizations, sex work), Jaene has been fortunate to find that her darkest moments became her greatest strengths. Trying to manifest a world without these labels, Jaene lives through her art where she feels most present. Jaene uses various forms of art and teachings to help free other’s minds from the boxes we have made. Jaene’s art is an adventure that is the brilliance and heart-break of living a life less ordinary. She believes this creates an environment for further dialogue on the ideas of wellness, illness and worthiness. When not making art, Jaene is an activist and advocate. She believes in positive self representation (especially in the media) and the power of lived experience. Jaene knows that the voices of lived experiences should be integral to all forms of policy and Governance. She believes that stigma thrives in the shadows of shame, in an effort to combat this, Jaene uses her genuine voice to make a space for these conversation in the public.

Jamaias DaCosta

Jamaias DaCosta is a mother, a writer, a radio geek and a lover of radical rhythmic roots resurgence. Having spent over a decade working in radio and community education, Jamaias has been co-Host and Producer of The Vibe Collective radio show for the last eight years, and Producer of Indigenous Waves Radio for the last four years, both on CIUT 89.5FM. As a workshop facilitator, Jamaias has worked with grade schools, universities and multiple organizations and conferences for anti-oppression, social justice training with a focus on art, Indigenous education and decolonial thought. As a writer, Jamaias has worked with Caribbean Tales Film Festival, CBC, Muskrat Magazine and multiple publications. Jamaias sits on the advisory Board of Mixed in Canada, and is a mixed settler of Kanien’keha:ka, Cree, Irish and French, Jamaican (Colombian, African, Portuguese, Sephardic Jew) ancestry. Jamaias will be releasing her first spoken word recording project, Flint & Fire in early 2015.

Jasbina Sekhon

Jasbina is a non-binary, genderqueer, trans femme mixed Punjabi-Culturally Sikh/South Asian-Black-Arawak Caribbean person. Jasbina self-identifies as a womboi. Jasbina is currently balancing negotiating the industrial academic complex with the affirming healing creating Jasbina does as a Transcriptionist and Artist-Resident through the Trans-Disciplinary Artist Program (TAP) at the Watah Theatre Institute. Jasbina is a poet, a performance artist, sex worker (on hiatus), a yoga practitioner and theoretician, as well as being deeply committed to understanding and continuing to heal mutually constituted oppressions and trauma. Jasbina embraces Jasbina’s madness and continues to work on the process of decolonizing. Jasbina is a survivor of multiple traumas including incest, rape, sexual assault and institutionalization. These experiences deeply informed Jasbina, and Jasbina is learning to embracing Jasbina’s madness, exquisite sensitivity and empathic nature. Jasbina works in solidarity and love with the global village.

Joanna Lillian Thompson

Joanna identifies as a mixed-race (half Black/half Hispanic) and queer female. She was born in Alexandria, Virginia and raised in Rockville, Maryland. Joanna is currently a PhD student with the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her MA from UIC in 2012. Before moving to Chicago, she received her BA in Criminology and Investigations with a minor in Professional Writing and Editing from West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Joanna plays a very active role within her department, being a Teaching Assistant for the past 4 years. She is also very active around UIC’s campus, engaging in various service and leadership roles. Her PhD research focuses on understanding the experiences of interpersonal violence, such as bullying and harassment, against mixed-race college students. In her free time, she enjoys working out, traveling, and volunteering for the Human Rights Campaign.

Kiri Chaundy

Kiri is a proud Mixed Race British woman of Sierra Leonean, Nigerian, Austrian and English heritage. She graduated with a BSc in Sociology and now works as a freelance social researcher, providing third and public sector, non profit, independent think-tanks and charities with insight from data collection methodologies to aid social change. She is passionate about social equality and is lucky enough to be able to combine her love of meeting different groups of people with her research work. Her specific area of interest is racial equality and racial identity and believes education is the key to overcoming racism. Kiri is also an artist and set up a wallpaper design company in 2013. She has travelled extensively and sees herself as a free spirit and citizen of the world.

Latisha ‘Cairo’ Reddick

Latisha Reddick, known to her peers as ‘Cairo’, is a member of the Eastern Woodland Metis Nation of Nova, mixed with Guyanese, Black and Mi’kmaw ancestry. Cairo is the Founder and Program Coordinator for Sisters of the Soil (SOS), which supports solidarity initiatives between the Indigenous and People of Colour communities in Toronto. Cairo has a Bachelor of Arts Degree with Honours from the University of Toronto. She is currently a Juris Doctorate Candidate at Osgoode Hall School of Law. Cairo also works as the Program Officer to the Canadian Roots Exchange and was involved with the Indigenous Women, Memory and Power Project through the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. She has also worked with international grassroots initiatives through the Institute for Sustainable International Studies in Belize. Apart from her community work, Cairo also provides workshops and guest lectures at schools, such as the University of Toronto.

May Lui

May Lui is a mixed race (Chinese and Romanian/Polish/Jewish) cis-woman and Canadian-born settler who is a writer, educator and freelance consultant. She has a Master’s degree from University of Toronto/OISE in Adult Education, with a focus on anti-oppression and anti-racism education. She is a feminist, activist and general troublemaker for social justice. May has worked in the non profit sector for over 25 years in places such as Youthlink, Toronto Women’s Bookstore and Chinese Canadian National Council Toronto Chapter. She is also a volunteer with Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts and was a board member for 10 years.

Rehana Tejpar

Rehana is a mother, dancer, theatre artist and community arts facilitator of East African Indian, Uruguayan, Muslim and Guaraní ancestry. She has been designing curriculum and facilitating innovative education programs with young women, children and youth in Canada, Kenya and India for the past 10 years. Using Popular Education, Theatre of the Oppressed, InterPlay and Art of Hosting techniques, she co-creates space for taping into the wisdom in our bodies and communities. Rehana is dedicated to staging stories of social importance and evoking community dialogue. She is an active dance-theatre artist, director and playwright and was recently in Eventual Ashes’ Ocean Carving: A Performance in Water, at the 2015 Rhubarb Festival.

Thembani Mdluli

Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Thembani Mdluli is a Toronto-based, queer, mixed-race (Filipino, Zulu, Swati, Chinese) writer, filmmaker, and intermedia artist. Her work often explores the ways in which systematic and structural oppression affect human capacity for intimacy and vulnerability, and she is personally fascinated with the intersections between storytelling and social justice. She is especially interested in creating films and digital media that reflect the experiences of those who often find themselves marginalised by the mainstream canon of art, culture, and entertainment.

ACTIVE LISTENERS

Emmanuel Tabi

Emmanuel is a Ph.D candidate at OISE, University of Toronto. His work is focused on how reflections of race, gender and class intersect within Toronto and how they are performed through various forms of cultural production such as spoken word poetry and rapping. Emmanuel has been a spoken word poet for 11 years and is also a multi-instrumentalist who often employs the arts to connect with youth within the K-12 education system and through organizations such as The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Kerry’s Place Autism Services. He has presented his programs throughout Canada, the United States and Latin America. His present research looks at how cultural production is used to supplement the education system. He also examines how expression through the arts can provide spaces that allow for a more fluid examination of how we shape our understanding of “self”, others and the various communities we move through and exist within.

Dr. Tamari Kitossa

Tamri is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He earned his BA from York University, MA from York University’s Faculty of Education and Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Areas of instruction include sociology of the criminal legal system, sociology of punishment, debates in criminology and counter-colonial perspective of criminology. Research interests include: anti-blackness; counter-colonial perspective of criminology and racial profiling; Eurocentric bio-medical, cultural and religious sexualization of the African males; critical police studies; criminalization of African Canadians; and, interracial coupling in Canada. He is currently engaged in research and publication projects with Dr. Katerina Deliovsky on interracial couples and ‘repressive tolerance’ in Canada. With Drs. Philip Howard and Erica Lawson he is preparing a prospectus for an edited collection titled African Canadian Leadership: Perspectives on continuity, transition and transformation.